I plan to join Creative Cloud later this month, but also plan to upgrade my Mac Tower to a new one next Spring. I will be using the built in "migration assistant" in the OSX to do a hard drive "brain transplant" from the old Mac Tower to the new one once I purchase it. As I understand it, to make that work properly, I would need to deactivate ALL Creative Cloud programs first. Would I also need to "uninstall" them? Or should I deactivate them on the old machine, but then not transfer them at all to the new machine? Then download them fresh on the new machine? In the past, I have upgraded computers every four or five years, so assumming that the Creative Cloud is the way to go from here on out, this brain transplant needs to go smoothly, without counting as a "third copy" of the Creative Cloud apps. Thanks!

I've done the workflow you describe personally on my Macs. The deactivation is probably not critical but it definitely won't hurt and a good idea. Our licensing technology has improved in that if you attempt to activate on too many computers it now gives the end user an option to de-activate themselves versus having to call into support for assistance. I probably would also recommend uninstalling and then reinstalling on the new system. Reason being the installation of some products looks at the current system configuration when installing, using the migration assistant circumvents this occuring and could potentially cause issues. I'd also make sure your permissions are in order after the migration.

Be warned: If you do not deactivate and then de-install ALL creative cloud apps and creative cloud ITSELF, you will have a completely broken installation on your new Mac. I just did this (using Migration Assistant). Everything except Adobe products migrated just fine. But Creative Cloud will not start, will not uninstall, and will not allow me to deactivate or uninstall any Adobe Apps. Right now I'm painstakingly going through my whole Mac including hidden library files trying to clean out Creative Cloud. Horrible, horrible experience.

It's a bit of a disaster with the migration. I've just had three macs migrate and not one of them worked. When you load cloud there are no apps or anyway to change accounts to try something else. However Adobe were excellent and remotely fixed the issue on each machine. That said the migration still makes sense as everything else works perfectly so it's still worth doing and then allowing an hour to chat to Adobe to fix the issues.